


Power Lost and Regained

by PureBatWings



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, James Bond - All Media Types
Genre: Bisexual Character, Cold war spies, F/F, F/M, MI6, Period Typical Attitudes, Problem--solved!, The Problem of Susan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-22
Updated: 2017-07-22
Packaged: 2018-12-05 13:43:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11579244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PureBatWings/pseuds/PureBatWings
Summary: She remembered what it was like to rule in Narnia. Gaining power in 1950s England is going to be a more complex, less straight-foward thing...Usual legal disclaimers apply. Not my characters, not for money, no copyright infringement implied.





	Power Lost and Regained

November 20, 1947

“When we go back to Narnia,” said Lucy wistfully looking up from a sock she was darning, “will centuries have passed again?”

Her older sister turned from watching the evening snow get swallowed up by the grey twilight rapidly turning into night. It was a frigid damp darkness in a cold world. The world war was over for two years, but rationing of all manner of foodstuffs and clothing continued. She sighed in exasperation. At nearly sixteen Lucy still was such a child.

“Oh for god’s sake, Lucy, shut it. Let’s listen to the evening broadcast about the royal wedding. That’s our here and now, we are living in England, not planning feasts in the great hall of Cair Paravel.”

“We never did have a royal wedding in Narnia—the best one was Corin and Aravis in Archenland. I wonder if they had any twins in their family…” she said wistfully, ignoring Susan’s strongly worded suggestion.

Susan whirled away from where she was fiddling with the radio’s bakelite knobs, trying to get a stronger signal from the BBC and stood looming over Lucy. “If you say anything about Narnia or Aslan or the least iota of anything related to it, I shall slap you silly,” she growled, putting her hand to her side in a fist and trying to leash her temper.

Lucy looked up at her. “Susan the Gentle, my arse. Fine, I’ll go talk with Ed, then,” said Lucy crossly, tossing her braids back impatiently over her shoulders and flouncing out of the parlor. She insisted on talking about things that were over, were done, would never come again, thought Susan, huffing in annoyance.

She set a placid expression on her face and went to get her mother from the kitchen where she was finishing up cleaning the dirty dishes. “Mum, the evening broadcast about Princess Elizabeth’s wedding is starting soon.”

Eileen Pevensie gave her eldest daughter a small smile, wiped the final glass she had been washing dry and took off her apron. She wore grey and black and lilac. Privately Susan though she clung to her late husband’s memory like a second rate, middle class Queen Victoria with her widow’s weeds. Dad had done some very hush-hush work during the War. He had worked sequestered somewhere deep in the English countryside. He had avoided the London Blitz and bullets at the front only to die when he was hit by a speeding car during a blackout while on leave home, only months before VE Day.

What use His Majesty’s War Effort had had for a secondary level maths teacher fond of codes and an amateur cryptographer was never made explicit, but two official looking men in dark suits had conveyed their condolences with the news of his death. Soon after a rather astoundingly large cheque had appeared in the letterbox with an official sympathy letter to their mother. The check had been earmarked “For the education of young Pevensies.”

Of course Pete and Ed got the first crack at the school funds. Boys took precedence in Narnia and England, she though sourly. But happily, there was still money left to put Susan and then Lucy in a decent local day school and to cover its fees. With a scholarship she had ended up at university as well.

She took day classes at the University of London and a few secretarial classes in the evenings to assuage her mother’s worry that she wouldn’t be able to earn a living with her languages. None of her siblings seemed to care that they had gone from rulers back to children or young adults, thrown back to being powerless not once, but two or three times after Narnia and Aslan tossed them, like rubbish, back into the grey tedium of England. The difference in status made Susan feel whiplashed and uncertain of how to act normally in everyday situations.

“We’re held safe in Aslan’s paws,” said Peter philosophically and kept on keeping on. “Or it’s in God’s hands and His Will, if you prefer this world’s terms.”

“I don’t prefer either!” snarled Susan. “Don’t you miss the excitement, the freedom, even the battles, the titled ladies throwing themselves in your direction?”

He gave her a mild look, a reproof. “I remember making difficult decisions, weighty matters of state and feeling responsible for any number of beings under our rule. It’s relaxing to only have to swot for exams and play rugger after classes and have a few pints after studying.”

“You’re impossible,” she said, scowling, and tried to reason with her younger brother on a different day.

“Ed, do you enjoy being a child again?” Edmund blinked owlishly at her and considered her question judiciously.

“Well, no. But it gives me a chance not to repeat the follies of my youth and try make wiser choices this go ‘round. I can’t say I like being seventeen again, but at least I know my days of having spots do eventually end.” He took up his book, _The Diary of Anne Frank_ , and resumed reading, trying to shut her out. She thought about his opinion and grudgingly conceded defeat. “That almost makes sense. But I lived as I wanted to, until we got yanked back here. I didn’t listen to any prince who bored me, even for diplomatic reasons."

He shrugged. “I think that perhaps we weren’t meant to marry and have children there. I don’t know about here. Anyway, Luce and I are a bit young to worry about that whole romance business yet.” His casual dismissal of forming bonds with anyone aside from family and school chums also annoyed her.

He didn’t remember the intense passions, the fevered flirtations when they became adults, their beloved friends, the laughing dryads or sprightly fawns that enchanted by their very existence.

She was a one woman volcano, seething under her calm surface, she thought. Bism and its salamanders that Jill Pole had told her about had nothing on the caldera of her rage and pain. For all she told Lucy to deal with the reality of England, it seemed sometimes like her memories of Narnia haunted her more than the others. She was a hybrid British-Narnian and the Narnia part haunted her at the oddest times.

Last month when her cycle had brought fiercer cramps than usual and she had nausea atop the headache and annoyance of bleeding, she had gone to her college’s infirmary to seek help. She was perfunctorily given two white pills, a glass of cool water and offered the matron’s couch for a lie down with a hot water bottle until she felt better and her next class started. Lying on her side, she closed her eyes, not letting the tears escape. She knew there were better ways to deal with this unpleasant side effect of being female, she had experienced them.

In Narnia, her favorite lady in waiting, Selena, had led her to a quiet green glade and a limpid pool where the naiads played. When they tired of one another’s embraces, a human was welcome to join them, Selena explained to Queen Susan with a wink and a salacious smile.

Susan floated on the water’s surface, her long dark hair imitating long fronds of water plants as the cool fingers of the water creatures brushed soothingly over her belly, teasing fingers plying her breasts into shudders of delight and tempting plush lips brushing hers. The orgasms were a delightful distraction from her achy body leaking blood. Instead of feeling sweaty and sticky and nasty, she was boneless, her body floating on the water as her mind floated in languid pleasure...

  **1948**

Peter was twenty, in his final year at Oxford, at Pembroke College. She had teased him that he picked the school only because of the three lions on the college’s shield. He planned on post-grad work at Cambridge in the sciences.

At first, hauled back from Narnia, Susan considered how she might become a queen again. Marrying someone English and noble was as unlikely as Lucy shutting her gob about Narnia. At this rate, she would be eventually visiting her sister in a sanatorium, because really, it had to be a sure sign of madness to say you ruled a magical land with your three siblings. In comparison, asserting you were Napoleon or a reborn Cleopatra seemed a run of the mill delusion, or, if you were wealthy enough, a charming eccentricity.

There was no way Susan would let herself be lumped in with Lucy and jailed with the truly mad people.

She turned her mind to fashion, and how to charm men, especially upper class men with power. It was a challenge to stand out with clothes rationing still on, but she managed to turn men's heads and a few women's heads with her figure and then engage them with her wit. She practiced her upper class accent on them and re-learned how to calibrate a flirtation so a man didn’t leave angry at her demurrals, but rather amused and flattered by her attention, despite the ultimate rejection.

Her marks were very strong—politics and history she excelled in, and the French, German and Latin that had seemed difficult Before Narnia were laughably simple After Narnia and delving into the intricacies of learning the Calormenes' tongue. She had become fluent in it for diplomatic reasons—it was akin to the earth language of Arabic—but she affected a strong Narnia accent and broken grammar when conversing at the Tisroc’s court. Hiding her fluency made her seem a pretty, empty headed thing, the preferred pattern of womanhood in that sandy land. She liked playing the spy for their diplomatic mission, when the Calormenes thought her only a matrimonial prize.

She returned to England with a passion for communication. She never mastered more than a few phrases of the Mer-people's sung language, but now she was eager to be as polyglot as possible. She was studying modern Hebrew and Russian to add to her useful language skills and had Morse Code memorized. Exactly what her useful place would be was not quite clear to her yet.

In March, around Lady Day, Peter rang her with an invitation.

He was sure to get a first in Mathematics and another in Engineering, specifically mechanical computing. He was keen to work with Turing at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington once he had his degree in hand. The British needed to keep pace with their former allies in the States.

“Come to tea at my college at half-past four next Friday,” he said to Susan, his manner more akin to King Peter regally issuing proclamations, than a undergraduate. “There’s someone I’d like to meet you. I’m pretty sure the government is trying to recruit me, perhaps to do work similar to Father’s during the war. They are always looking for people with language skills as well, so I mentioned you and asked if you might come and speak with them as well.”

Susan agreed half-heartedly as she considered whether Korean or Cantonese (she already had Mandarin) would be more useful to acquire. Perhaps for a change, she should learn British or American Sign Language.

When the day arrived, she dressed carefully—one never knew when one might encounter someone titled or influential. She was sure to arrive early. Her entrance at Peter’s side, not at his heels, nor preceding him, was noted by the half dozen men who sat arranged around the Fellows' Room, sipping sherry. Peter was soon cornered by a trio of shadowy government types—a scientist, a spook and an engineer.

A glass of his preferred brand of whiskey was wordlessly placed in his hand by a nondescript dark haired man in his thirties with intense sharp eyes who then turned his attention to Susan, angling her away from the quartet’s discussion to sit with him on a couch some distance from the other men.

“Pick your poison, Miss Pevensie,” he said in an accent that screamed Eton and a posture that said “ex-military”.

“Have you any Coca-cola?” she asked. She had gotten rather addicted to the stuff on her trip to the States with her parents some years back.

“I took the precaution of procuring some for you from the Yanks,” he said, and returned soon with the fizzy drink over ice, like the Americans drank it and she preferred it. She thanked him and sat politely waiting for his next conversational gambit.

“I hear your strengths, unlike your brother’s, lies in languages,” he began in fluent, accentless French. Susan unblinkingly replied in the same tongue that she had studied French, Spanish, Italian and German and picked up Arabic as well as a few more. She did not elaborate that the few more were actually a dozen more and not just European tongues.

He grilled her next in Arabic. His Egyptian Arabic was only semi comprehensible, but when he swapped to Formal Arabic, she understood perfectly. Her tutor, who hailed from the trade city of Jeddah had told her that while Egyptians understood formal Arabic the reverse was usually not true.

Her Hebrew was pronounced solid after they had discussed the Arab-Israeli war in Palestine which had been ongoing since last November. When he inquired about her other languages she had come clean about her polyglot skills. Her Farsi was passable and he suggested Hindi or Urdu might be of interest given the end of the Raj and the emergence of the Islamic state of Pakistan.

From there he grilled her on current events in Berlin and a divided Germany, including her thoughts and analysis on containment of the growing communist treat worldwide. Absorbed in the challenging discussion, she barely noticed consuming her drink. Her brain felt thoroughly challenged for the first time in a great while by someone other than her professors.

The rattle of ice cubes brought her back to her surroundings and she looked about for a place to set her glass down. Her interlocutor took it from her and held out his hand.

“Jerrold Chesterfield-Browne, a pleasure to chat with you, Miss Pevensie,” he said, introducing himself belatedly. “My employer will be in touch with you once you take your degree. I’m sure we can find a good niche for a young woman such as yourself, assuming you have a sense of adventure and wish to see more of the world than greater London.”

She nodded, unaware that the challenging conversation had equaled a job interview. He passed her his business card, which proclaimed him the owner of Peccavi Ltd, an import-export firm. Underneath was a London area phone number.

“Thank you, sir,” she said, inclining her head graciously, even regally, and tapping the card with her index fingernail before she slipped it into her purse.

**June 2, 1953**

It was six years before she saw him again.

Her world had utterly altered from where it was when she was nineteen. She was sitting her final exams in the spring of ’49 while the rest of her family was going for a holiday at Professor Kirke’s house. An engine train had ignored signals and rear ended a stationary train. Another train traveling in the opposite direction, with her family aboard, had run into the wreckage and more than a hundred people were killed.

The day after the train disaster she had been notified by the authorities and had numbly taken another train up to Middlesex to identify her family members' bodies. They had looked strangely asleep, like Aslan had when dead, before the Stone Table broke and he returned, alive. No miracles now, she thought and bonelessly sunk onto the wood train bench, outside the makeshift mortuary. It was as hard and unforgiving as any church pew.

A blonde woman in a smart suit and a man with an Oxbridge accent had taken a seat on either side of her, and began speaking in low, soothing tones. “We’ll get this sorted for you, Miss Pevensie. Our boss sent us to assist you,” assured the woman, who gave her name as Alexandra Young. Her colleague, Jeremy Oldham, made soothing rumbling noises of agreement and went to sort out with the coroner when the four bodies might be released for burial.

She went through a fog of crying and sleeping and signing necessary paperwork over the next fortnight, the agents checking in on her at least twice a day to assure themselves that she was still among the living. Her exam grades came by post, and her results were exemplary. Susan wasn’t sure it mattered. Her family was obliterated and her grief-muddled mind was hardly up to starting a new job in a month or two.

After six weeks at home she was about to go stir crazy. She felt fragile but eager to get out of the house in Finchley. It was feeling more like a trap than a refuge. She had cleaned out the residence and listed it with an agent soon after. It was too full of family history and too large for a single woman's residence. Putting a few pieces of furniture in temporary storage, she had begun work for the agency, translating telegrams and typing up memos that came four times a day to London from all corners of the globe. She lived in a women’s boarding house not far from Whitehall and spent her evenings idly perusing the papers for flats to let when she wasn't training in unarmed combat, knife throwing and increasing her shooting proficiency. Her archery skills came back to her and she was exempted from that training, at least.

In 1950 with the start of the Korean War, she had been transferred to Taiwan to assist in operations there in the East Asia division before earning a promotion and a stint in West Germany monitoring the Russians, providing analysis and support to the field agents and a doing a bit of fieldwork herself.

She had had a few affairs in Berlin with men—some as field work related assignments with Russians or Germans, others purely for her own pleasure with unattached coworkers. If she dallied with a few women too, well she made damn sure her employer didn’t get a whisper of a hint about her bisexual ways. While Senator McCarthy’s witch hunts weren’t being emulated here in Britain, no one trusted inverts to avoid blackmail forever. Even spies needed to keep some secrets from their nation.

The start of ’53 found her back in England, where her language and administrative skills brought her to the attention of the number two man in MI6, George Harrowbrook, an old school pal of the man known to some as Jerrold Chesterfield-Browne. He'd been at Eton the same time as JB, said George, until the other man was expelled for dallying with a housemaid at thirteen or fourteen.

Harrowbrook became her supervisor and was pleasantly pleased with Susan’s almost preternatural anticipation of his office needs ranging from Irish Breakfast tea with enough tannins to preserve a bog body to a precis on the latest intelligence concerning Josef Stalin’s failing health.

When the conservatives came back into power that year, his supervisor, M, was politely but firmly encouraged to take his retirement and go enjoy his holiday cottage in Truro, Cornwall. Harrowbrook, the new M, had firmly taken over the reins, placing Susan as his secretary and right hand woman.

She had had so many names she went by over the last six years that when he told her her latest alias, she had merely shrugged and committed another fictitious background story to memory. M had tasked her with the orientation and outfitting of the agents hired for his new elite force of agents. Known primarily by their double-O designation, they were all male but one, ex-military and overly sure of themselves, in her opinion. The day after the coronation (an event which reminded her all too much of her Narnian crowning) a man in his thirties had walked into her office for his initial meeting with M.

His dark hair was styled differently and he wore horn rimmed glasses that she knew must be part of his cover since all the double O’s were expert snipers.

“Mr Chesterfield-Browne?” she asked, looking up frostily in his direction. They were a grabby, flirty bunch and competed to see who had the worst reputation as a ladykiller.  She’d already had to verbally shoot a few down the last fortnight. The next time actual shots might be fired, she thought darkly.

He raised an eyebrow quizzically. “Not for quite a few years, no. The name is Bond, Miss Moneypenny, James Bond.”


End file.
